Why I'm Not A Christian

A cumulative case

1 Introduction

I’ve made no secret of the fact that Christianity is the religion I’ve spent the most time thinking about. I’ve been making my way through the Bible (good book, would recommend, sad ending with the whole Jesus dying thing—I had to stop reading at that point, couldn’t make it to the end after they’d killed off my favorite character😊). Most theists I most look up to intellectually—Aron Wall, Dustin Crummett, Robin Collins, Philip Swenson, and Brian Cutter—are Christians.

Despite this, I’m not a Christian, and I think there are good reasons to think Christianity is probably false. While it’s still the religion that I have the highest credence in—followed by Hinduism—I cannot quite believe it. I thought I’d explain why in this essay.

In short, the primary reason I reject Christianity is that I think Christianity has many doctrinal commitments that are likely to be false. Many of the core Christian claims strike me as very implausible, particularly when considered as a whole. In short, the Christian claims that are hard to accept are:

• The trinity.

• The atonement.

• The perfection and accuracy of Jesus.

• The inspiration of scripture.

When evaluating Christianity, there can sometimes be something of a bait and switch. Christians will note, correctly, that if Jesus rose from the dead then Christianity is almost guaranteed to be true. But then they’ll mistakenly infer that the only thing that needs to be considered when evaluating Christianity is whether Jesus rose from the dead.

This isn’t right. Christianity is a worldview, not just a claim that one man once rose from the dead. In evaluating a worldview, whose claims are probabilistically dependent on each other, one needs to look at the worldview as a whole, not merely at one of the core claims. In evaluating Orthodox Judaism, for instance, one cannot merely look at the evidence for the revelation at Sinai—they must also look at whether it’s plausible that, for instance, every word of the Torah is from God.

Often the ancillary claims of a worldview are much more evidentially significant than its claims about its most important event. Christianity makes many distinct claims about various things having nothing to do with the resurrection. The sheer number of these external commitments makes their cumulative weight potentially far more significant than the resurrection.

If you’re a Christian, I’d love to hear a longform reply to these arguments. I want to believe Christianity if it’s true. But here’s why I so far think it’s not.

2 The trinity

Christians are committed to the trinity—the notion that there are three divine persons but only one God. The trinity is a famously slippery doctrine, almost impossible to understand. Unsurprisingly, there have been many distinct ways to conceptualize the trinity, and I can’t hope to discuss all of them. Nonetheless, I’ll discuss some common criticisms.

The core Trinitarian claim is that The Father, Son, and Spirit are each God, but are not identical to each other. The Father is God, The Son is God, and The Spirit is God, but The Father isn’t The Son or The Spirit, and The Son isn’t The Spirit.

In evaluating this claim, we must ask: what does it mean to say The, Son, and Holy Spirit are God? When someone says “A is B” they can be using the word “is” either in the sense of identity or predication. One uses “is” in a predicative sense if they say something has a property. For instance, you might say “the man is tall” or “the trinity is confusing.” In this case, you’re saying of something that it is something else—of the man that he is tall and of the trinity that it is confusing.

But if The Father, Son, and Spirit are each God in a predicative sense, then there are plainly three Gods. There are three persons, each of whom have the property of being God. That’s polytheism, Patrick!

The other way you can use the term “is” denotes identity. If you say “Superman is Clark Kent,” you’re not saying what property he has, but instead saying who he is. You’re saying that two persons are really the same. Similarly, if you say “Bentham’s Bulldog is his mother’s son,” you are saying I and my mother’s son are the very same person.

It’s standardly assumed that the “is” used in trinitarian language is the is of identity. But this faces a problem: identity is transitive. If A is B and B is C, then A is C. If I’m Bentham’s Bulldog, and I’m my mother’s son, then Bentham’s Bulldog is my mother’s son. If Superman is Clark Kent, and Superman is Lois Lane’s husband, then Clark Kent is Lois Lane’s husband. But if identity is a transitive relation, then for The Father, Son, and Spirit to each be God, so too would they all have to be each other.

Now one might reply by noting that there’s one case in which identity appears intransitive: identity within a person. I am Matthew (the person), and my seven year old self is Matthew (the person), but I am not my seven year old self. Certainly I am the same person as my seven year old self, but I am not identical to my seven year old self. Perhaps analogously, The Son can be the same being as The Father without being identical to The Father.

I don’t find this convincing. That identity is transitive strikes me as a conceptual truth—it seems totally obvious that if A is the same as B which is the same as C, then A is the same thing as C. For this reason, in my judgment, we should think of persons as having distinct temporal parts. My present self is only a part of me, as is my seven-year-old self. But if A is a part of B, and C is a part of B, A and C obviously don’t need to be the same. My fingers are different from my toes, though both are parts of me.

Even if one rejects this account, I think they’ll need some resolution to this puzzle other than just abandoning the transitivity of identity. But this then won’t help with the trinity.

Worst case scenario, we can modify the principle to be that identity at a time is transitive.

If A is identical to B either at some specific time or timelessly and B is identical to C at that same time, or timelessly if A is timeless, then A is identical to C.

This principle will face no such counterexample.

Lastly, even if there’s no straightforward contradiction in the trinity, it’s still quite puzzling. What makes the three persons distinct in person yet identical in being? Quite a mystery remains. The idea strikes me as very hard to grasp, and seemingly nonsensical.

Another reply given on behalf of trinitarians is that assuming that identity is transitive when applied to God is an unwarranted inference. Certainly identity is transitive when applied to creatures, but God is not a creature. That which is true of the characters in a play may not be true of its author.

It’s true that we should be cautious about making confident proclamations about what is true of God. On the other hand, we can’t just throw out obvious principles when they apply to God. It would be absurd to hold that God can violate the law of non-contradiction, for instance.

But the transitivity of identity strikes me as about as obvious of a truth as truths come. It’s not some special belief that we hold only as an inductive generalization based on experience. It seems utterly beyond doubt. If two things are the same, they must be the same in all respects—including regarding whether they’re the same as a third thing. For this reason, I would be very nervous about abandoning the transitivity of identity absent overwhelming evidence.

Another trinitarian puzzle: why three persons? Three is quite an arbitrary number. The number that seems most likely is one, as more than one person in a single being is of doubtful intelligibility. The next most likely number is infinity. Infinity is a distinctly non-arbitrary number, and divine persons are good things—the more good things the better! Three divine persons seems quite arbitrary and inherently unlikely.

The most famous defense of three divine persons comes from Richard Swinburne. Swinburne argues that there are different kinds of love which require different numbers of persons to be instantiated. With only one person, the only possible kind of love is self-love. God can’t be one person, because he wouldn’t have every kind of love—he’d only display self-love. With two persons, they can love each other. But with three, there’s a new kind of love: the kind involved in two people loving each other and creating through their loving act. This occurs when, for instance, two parents have a baby. Thus, for God to be maximally loving, he needs three persons in the Godhead, but there’s no reason for any more than three persons.

I find this super sketchy. There’s an obvious rationale for more than two divine persons: divine persons are good. More good stuff is good! If Christianity is true, it’s really great that The Holy Spirit exists! So why not make more?

The leap from two to three persons also seems suspicious. While people can love each other while performing various acts, I don’t think the love involved in creating a child is a categorically new kind of love. Instead, it’s just love of the ordinary sort geared towards a common activity. And The Father and Son could have collaborated to make the world, even without a third divine person.

Additionally, it seems that each successive person opens up a new kind of love. If the collaborative kind of love is a good thing, then collaboration with the Holy Spirit to beget a new divine person would also be good. So this, once again, predicts an endless succession of divine persons.

There can also be other kinds of love that depend on more persons. There’s a unique kind of love for large groups, like one’s country. For this reason, we’d expect many divine persons, not just three. Additionally, it seems easy to conceive of a kind of love that’s derivative of being in a group of four, or five, or six. We could imagine creatures whose ideal couplings involve unique groups of four. Thus, this is once again unable to answer the fundamental question: why three?

The last reply to these arguments that a Christian can give: declare that it’s a mystery, but note that the world is full of mysteries. Quantum physics is famously mysterious. Would we not expect God to be the same way? The fact that God is a bit weird in some ways seems perfectly concordant with Christian expectations.

But this response has two crucial problems. First of all, if a doctrine is sufficiently improbable, it will still be evidence against the religion that asserts it. God is likely to be weird in various ways, but if a religion asserts that God is simultaneously existent and nonexistent, that would obviously be a problem.

Second and more worryingly, whether some improbable doctrinal commitment is evidence against a religion depends on two facts: the probability that it would be part of the religion if the religion was true and the probability that it would be part of the religion if the religion is false. For any fact, whether it’s evidence for or against a hypothesis is solely a function of whether it’s likelier given the hypothesis than its falsity or vice versa. This follows from Bayes’ theorem.

For example, suppose I found a religion and declare that God gave me the right to marry a bunch of women, some of whom are very young, and have sex with people as young as nine or fourteen (totally hypothetical example, not related to any real religions). This would be very strong evidence against the religion. This isn’t just because it’s unlikely that God would sanction this, but that it’s way more likely someone would make it up than that God would sanction it. It’s a lot more likely some human would claim God gave him special marriage privileges to sleep with teenagers than that God would actually do that.

Or suppose I ask someone their phone number and they tell me it’s 1,111,111,111. It’s very likely they’re lying. Even though that’s no less likely than any other phone number, it’s way more likely to be one they’d make up. (Pretend, for this example, that every sequence of 10 digits is someone’s phone number).

Thus, whether the trinity is evidence against Christianity will depend on the odds that the trinity is real vs the odds that it would be claimed that the trinity was real if it wasn’t.

The odds that the trinity would be real seem extremely low. Even putting aside the above philosophical challenges, it’s a highly weird and specific doctrine. No one would have guessed the trinity was correct before it was revealed.

In contrast, the odds that Christians would come to falsely believe in a trinity seem much higher. The basic picture of how they’d come to adopt this belief is quite straightforward: Jesus made significant claims about himself. Through repeated retellings and religious veneration, Jesus was eventually venerated to the point of being a God—just as all characters in religious tales grow grander over time. As the Hindus and Muslims elevated scripture to the level of the divine, so too have Christians done that with Jesus.

However, Christians couldn’t just become polytheists because monotheism is a huge part of the Judaism that Christianity sprung out of. Thus, they ended up trying to mix Jesus’s claim to be God with monotheism, and eventually got something like the trinity. That account strikes me as way more inherently likely than the trinity to be right.

It may seem hard to make such relative probabilistic judgments. However, it seems obviously likelier that Jesus would be claimed to be God by the early Christian community, if he wasn’t, than that Jesus would actually be God but somehow distinct from The Father. The other stuff—the addition of The Holy Spirit, for instance—seems equally likely to be added on by the Christians or true conditional on Jesus being God, so the rest of the trinity, beyond the mere claim that Jesus is God but not The Father, is probabilistically irrelevant.

In short, the trinity is really weird and paradoxical. It’s super intrinsically unlikely to be true. It’s much more likely to be made up—people have a bad habit of declaring things that are not God to be gods. Polytheism was ubiquitous in the ancient world for this reason. The odds of the trinity being falsely claimed are substantially higher than the odds of it being true.

3 The atonement

Similarly to the trinity, the atonement is weird. Jesus’s death on the cross is supposed to somehow atone for our sins, providing remission for our guilt.

This is a super weird doctrine! Normally someone else getting violently tortured to death has no relation to what we deserve. While other people can pay off things you might owe to someone, they cannot suffer a punishment that you rightfully deserve.

The trinity and the incarnation are the central mysteries of Christianity. But normally believing extremely mysterious doctrinal pronouncements is a defect of one’s view. It is a cost of certain sects of Buddhism that they hold that all is one, as that claim seems ridiculous on its face.

Punishing someone innocent in our place as the means of forgiving us seems manifestly wicked. God could forgive us without needing to punish an innocent man. Even if retributivism is true—which I highly doubt—it seems that one cannot die for another’s sins.

Now, there are many models of the atonement, and I cannot hope to discuss them in detail. But at the very least, I think even Christians will grant that the atonement is weird—it’s the sort of thing that you should think is unlikely to be true prior to the finding of Christ. It’s a great mystery of the faith, notoriously difficult to get one’s head around.

For a while, there was a model of the atonement that seemed somewhat attractive to me. This model was articulated by Robin Collins. The core idea is that God becomes incarnate so he can take on every virtue—including those like courage that he can’t exercise while being a disembodied mind, because one needs to face danger to display courage. Then, he transmits those virtues to us, so that this can deepen his connection with us.

The core problem is that I now find it deeply mysterious how the transmission of virtues works. How can I receive the virtues of Jesus? How is that any different from God just beaming virtues directly into my mind—which he could do without Jesus? Robin has tried to explain this, but I didn’t find his account very plausible.

Thus, the atonement is weird. It has a low prior probability. The odds that it would be true are low.

In contrast, the odds that the atonement would be fabricated seem much higher. Jesus got crucified, and his doing so was not very improbable given his lofty claims and the public outrage he generated. The religious community who followed Jesus was comprised of ancient Jews who believed in animal sacrifice. It’s unsurprising, in light of the surrounding context, that upon seeing Jesus be crucified and then falsely believing him to be God, they’d think something like the atonement was true.

Now, one might object that Christianity being true better explains why the Old Testament alludes to blood sacrifice. In other words, you get a better explanation of Levitical animal sacrifice if you posit it foreshadowed Jesus. This matters for the argument, because it would show that Christianity better explains the background conditions which the non-Christian uses to explain the atonement.

This point only has limited force. Human sacrifice is not uncommon in human history, and neither is animal sacrifice. It’s not that unlikely ancient Judaism would have animal sacrifice even if Christianity were false.

In fact, this point might ultimately go the other way. Animal sacrifice is immoral and barbaric. Killing innocent animals for the sake of cleansing of sins is the sort of thing that every modern person would recognize to be immoral if it weren’t part of their religious practices. I think it’s pretty unlikely that God would include that as a practice of his chosen people.

Thus, the atonement is like the trinity, in that it is a very weird and improbable doctrine. However, it’s easy to see how it could have been falsely believed in the surrounding context. For this reason, it’s likelier to be the byproduct of human error than of God.

4 Scripture

Were I to be a Christian, I would not be an inerrantist. I think the case against inerrancy is about as convincing as the case is for anything. The Bible is filled with bits that look like obvious errors. For instance, Genesis 4 and 5 have related but contradictory genealogies.

Genesis 19 tells the story of Lot having incestuous sex with his daughters, who then gave birth to what ultimately became the enemy nations of Israel. It’s obviously far more likely that the Israelites would make up mean stories about how their enemies got there than that a single act of incest with two daughters would result in two pregnancies, which then founds two separate enemy nations.

In Exodus 3:6 God says “And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make myself known to them by my name [Tetragrammaton].” However, in Genesis, God was known by the Tetragrammaton. The modern scholarly view of the Torah—which claims different stories got fused together—has quite an easy explanation of these facts. However, inerrancy does not.

The book of Joshua is dedicated almost entirely to discussing the glory of the conquests by which the Israelites conquered and pillaged with little regard for innocent people. Joshua 6 describes what happened after they conquered Jericho:

²⁴ Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house. ²⁵ But Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho—and she lives among the Israelites to this day.

Joshua 8 describes similar brutality after conquering Ai:

²⁴ When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. ²⁵ Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. ²⁶ For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed^[a] all who lived in Ai. ²⁷ But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.

One can, of course, cook up elaborate justifications for Israeli conquest. But the ubiquity of the conquest combined with its alleged divine sanction makes this quite hard to swallow. The odds primitive militaristic Israelites would think God loved it when they conquered are much higher than the odds that God actually would love it when they conquer and senselessly murder women and children. Almost everyone thinks the gods approve of their sieges and conquests.

Not only is Joshua morally objectionable, it’s also factually doubtful. The dominant historical view is that it was written long after the events it purports to describe, and was primarily fiction. In particular, archaeology seems to put pressure on the claims made in Joshua.

As James Kugel explains well, nearly all of the Bible is better explained as primitive mythmaking than recording actual history. It’s not just the early books. The Psalms—the music of the Bible—often contains passages like this one (talking about Babylonian babies):

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones Against the rock.

Or look at Isaiah, and its routine and violent fulminations against Israel’s enemies. Talking about the Babylonians, for instance, it says:

⁹ Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.

…

¹⁵ Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.

¹⁶ Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.

¹⁷ Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.

¹⁸ Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not spare children.

¹⁹ And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

Isaiah 49:26 contains the delightful sentiment:

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh; they will be drunk on their own blood, as with wine. Then all mankind will know that I, the Lord, am your Savior, your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

It’s not hard to find passages like this. The Hebrew Bible is filled with obviously morally objectionable sentiments. One can find things that seem like errors on almost every page. A sizeable portion of the Bible is dedicated to either gloating about past conquest or hypothetical future conquest.

This will obviously be evidence against Christianity. If the Bible were extremely wise, just, and temperate throughout, that would raise the odds of Christianity, so the fact that it’s run through with errors is evidence against it. The Bible—certainly the Hebrew Bible—looks much more like what a non-Christian familiar with its contents would expect than what a Christian would.

More troublingly, Jesus seemed to have a high view of scripture. John 10:35 asserts “scripture cannot be broken.” In Matthew 5:17-18, Jesus notes that he has “not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” He claims “until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” Jesus seems to repeatedly take scripture to be authoritative as people at his time did. Thus, Jesus seems to have had a much higher view of scripture than is correct. Jesus seemed to believe the Bible was without error, but it’s plainly not.

Now, one can, of course, posit that he was exaggerating the veracity of scripture to fit into the surrounding culture. But it’s much more natural to suppose instead that he was simply mistaken about scripture, and that Christianity is false. Making excuses for false statements is always a cost. If Jesus isn’t God, given the surrounding context, we’d expect Jesus to have a high view of scripture. If he is, him viewing scripture as highly as he does is extremely surprising.

5 Jesus

The core Christian claim is that Jesus is God: he does not err. But, in my judgment, the gospels point to various errors—both moral and factual—that Jesus made.

It must be said: Jesus said a lot of good stuff. He described the importance of giving to the poor. The world would be better if more people followed that prescription. But he said enough that was sketchy that the overall pattern of facts points against his divinity. I won’t include a comprehensive list of his errors, but instead just list the ones I found in a few chapters of Matthew. Then, I’ll talk about some of the passages throughout the New Testament that I find most troubling.

One apparent error comes from Jesus’s proclamation in Matthew 5:32:

“But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

This view on divorce is very implausible. Couples, on average, are happier after divorces. While one should be quite cautious about getting a divorce, forcing couples to remain together for decades when they’re miserable and hate each other is a disaster. Certainly most of those without religious opposition to divorce don’t end up thinking it’s impermissible in principle. People only adopt this view because Jesus taught it; but if a worldview forces one to believe otherwise improbable things, that is generally a cost.

When I’ve presented more liberal Christians with this passage, they’ve had a few different defenses. Sometimes, they note that divorce was bad for women in the ancient world, who lost their main source of income and often had to turn to prostitution. But this doesn’t explain why Jesus condemns remarrying a divorced woman. In addition, Jesus could have said something like “you may only divorce a woman if she is financially stable after the divorce.”

Another reply: Jesus was not describing practical advice but ideal conduct. For example, he says in Matthew 5:39 “do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.” Surely at some point you get to resist and evil person!

But the condemnation against divorce is much more specific. One can always explain away any command as being a non-literal example of Jesus going overboard, but this is an implausible interpretation of highly specific and direct advice.

In Matthew 6:25, he claims:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

That seems like bad advice!

Much of the New Testament consists of Jesus casting out demons—performing exorcisms. Even if you think that demons exist and exorcisms can be effective, at the very least the New Testament seems to overestimate their prevalence. Once again, it seems much more likely that Jesus would be falsely believed to constantly be casting out demons than that he would be constantly casting out demons, given how ubiquitous false beliefs about casting out demons have been.

Jesus made various other bizarre pronouncements. He says in Matthew 10:

³⁴ “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵ For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶ And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. ³⁷ Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. ³⁸ And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹ Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Were anyone other than Jesus to assert this, they would be universally recognized to be either insane or wicked. Now, of course, you should worship God but not men, so God would be more likely to make this claim than merely a very virtuous individual. But still, it strikes me as quite an unlikely claim for God to make, in light of the immense value of familial relationships.

In Matthew 12:32, Jesus declares “And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” Now, generally Christians interpret blaspheming The Holy Spirit as being a poetic way of talking about remaining rebellious against God. But it seems a more natural reading is simply that blaspheming The Holy Spirit (which is, assuming the trinity was a later development, closely wrapped up with the father) is something unforgivable.

In Matthew 12, Jesus says:

⁴⁶ While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers^[a] stood outside, asking to speak to him.^{[b] 48} But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” ⁴⁹ And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ⁵⁰ For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

This seems…oddly mean. That’s no way to treat your mother and brothers! I don’t think this is a decisive proof, but if Jesus’s moral character is to tell us about Christianity, him appearing petty or vindictive will be evidence against Christianity.

I could give many more examples. Once again, the examples I’ve given have come almost exclusively from casually reading a few chapters of Matthew. Certainly the best examples would come from a more comprehensive survey of the New Testament, which is filled with bizarre claims. For instance, John 6 declares:

⁵² The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”

⁵³ Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

Certainly the notion that we’re supposed to drink Jesus’s blood and eat his flesh seems quite odd. It strikes me as very bizarre and improbable on its face.

When one considers the ubiquity of these bizarre passages—which must be explained away—it seems there’s a very powerful cumulative case against the perfection of Jesus. In particular, let me list three of the kinds passages I find the strongest evidence against Jesus’s moral perfection. So far I’ve surveyed just a few chapters to show the ubiquity of these odd pronouncements—here I’ll list the most troubling.

First, it seems like Jesus incorrectly predicts the second coming happening in his lifetime. David Bowen writes:

The basis for this view of Jesus is found in the gospel writers. Five particularly important verses are all found in Matthew. “When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matthew 10:23). “I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). “I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:36). “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:34-35). “But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64).

Probably the most decisive passage comes from Mark 13. In it, Jesus declares:

²⁴ “But in those days, following that distress,

“‘the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
²⁵ the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’^[c]

²⁶ “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. ²⁷ And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.

²⁸ “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. ²⁹ Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it^[d] is near, right at the door. ³⁰ Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. ³¹ Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Now, one can posit that Jesus was really foretelling of more immediate events that would be fulfilled in his lifetime. This is Bowen’s interpretation. But this seems rather ad hoc. If you simply heard the sentences displayed above, the most natural reading would be that the end of the world, wherein the Son of Man comes in all his glory, sitting at the right hand of the father, is imminent. This is particularly strong evidence against Christianity because such pronouncements are likely on the supposition Jesus wasn’t divine; at the time, apocalyptic prophets were relatively common.

Second, Jesus seems to endorse a morally objectionable antagonism towards one’s family. We’ve already explored this in some detail, but perhaps the most explicit statement comes in Luke 14:26, where Jesus proclaims that “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” Were one to hear this sentence out of context, they’d think the speaker a cult leader.

Third, Jesus provides remarkably vivid picture of hell. I won’t describe in detail why I think hell is immoral—I’ve already done that at considerable length. In short, I think the notion that most people deserve to suffer brutal torture is wildly implausible and would be recognized to be so in any other context. If anyone other than Jesus declares the permissibility of brutally tormenting much of the population, we would think this obviously immoral.

Jesus declares that in hell “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” and “This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace.” Matthew 25:46 declares “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Even though, in this passage, the term for eternal can have multiple meanings, eternal is the most natural reading. It seems likely that Jesus, at least, believed in an eternal hell. At the very least, Jesus believed people would be cast into a blazing furnace and burn. Christians now endorse a version of hell where it’s self-imposed—this is not the picture one gets from Jesus.

Most alarming is what Jesus seems to claim will send a person to hell; Mark 16:16 declares “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” In Matthew 7:13 Jesus seems to indicate that most people will suffer extreme torment in hell, when he declares “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”

Similarly surprising on the supposition Jesus is divine: most of the things he said are the sorts of things one could have been expected conceivably to say at the surrounding period. There are a range of important things he could have said that would have clearly vindicated his divine claim. He could have described the germ theory of disease, thus going on to save millions of lives. He could have advocated for the position that animal rights are of vital importance. He could have advocated for the abolition of slavery.

If Jesus were divine, he’d have likely provided many important messages that were not obvious to the people of the time. The fact that he had no messages that seem like they couldn’t have been devised by a person of his time period is surprising.

Now, it’s true Jesus provided some teachings that you wouldn’t expect someone of the time to make. Someone in the surrounding time period would have been unlikely to command people to drink his blood and eat his flesh. What is puzzling is that while he had some clearly good passages and some weird passages, there are few passages that would have been extremely weird at the time but that are clearly good in hindsight. Many people say things that are strange—what one would expect of God is commands that sound weird but turn out clearly right. It’s hard to think of many that Jesus uttered, that one could have been expected not to utter in the surrounding time period.

6 What about the evidence for Christianity?

So far I’ve mostly discussed the arguments against Christianity but have neglected the evidence for it. I cannot, of course, hope to discuss every argument for Christianity that anyone has given.

There are three decently popular arguments for Christianity: Lewis’s liar, lunatic, lord trilemma; arguments from prophecy, and historical evidence for the resurrection. I find the third more persuasive than the first two.

6.1 Liar, lunatic, lord

The first argument goes: there are four possibilities involving Jesus’s divine claims as reported in John:

1. He never said them.

2. He said them and was lying.

3. He said them and was mistaken, making him crazy.

4. He said them and they are true.

If the 4th option is right, then Jesus must be God—for his claim to be God would be true. Proponents of this argument claim that the other options are not tenable.

In short, I don’t think there are knockdown arguments against any of the options or a mix of them. People often object to the liar option on the grounds that it’s unlikely Jesus would lie if this resulted in his crucifixion. But presumably at the time he was telling many of the lies, he did not foretell his crucifixion—it’s not obvious that we can trust the detailed accounts of his trial.

Regarding the lunatic option, I think non-Christians will have to think Jesus was a bit nutty. Most people who tell you to eat their flesh are. He might not have been completely clinically insane, but could have compartmentalized his insanity, so that he is mostly normal but thinks some crazy things. This is how I am—a person at a party would never know my insane views on insects!

Most plausibly, in my view, is a mix of lunatic and legend. Jesus falsely thought himself to be the Messiah, but not God. He believed himself to be the Danielic son of man, but not God himself. This explains why he speaks as one with authority, and claims that he has special privileges from God. While this would take more space to lay out in detail, I do not think there’s good evidence that he claimed to be God—see Ehrman’s book for more details. Numerous people have believed themselves to be the Messiah without being particularly insane or wretched.

Thus, I think the most likely solution to Lewis’ quadrilemma is to accept that Jesus made certain mistaken elevated claims about his status. These claims grew over time as a result of later myths. His original claims explain the Gospel claims about him—being the son of God, for instance—but are modest enough that he can be mistaken about them without being a lunatic.

6.2 Prophecy

The argument from prophecy claims that Jesus fulfilled surprising and specific Old Testament prophecies. The most commonly cited prophecies are Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. Psalm 22 declares:

Many bulls surround me;
strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
¹³ Roaring lions that tear their prey
open their mouths wide against me.
¹⁴ I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
¹⁵ My mouth^[d] is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.

¹⁶ Dogs surround me,
a pack of villains encircles me;
they pierce^[e] my hands and my feet.

This doesn’t seem especially impressive on its own. Sure, it sort of sounds like a crucifixion, but it’s not surprising that you can find something that sounds like a reference to a crucifixion if you search the entire Bible.

In my view, Psalm 22 is inconclusive. There are plausible Jewish interpretations of the text as being a general lament. It would be very weird for a prophecy of Jesus to be tucked into a hard-to-interpret song in the Psalms. Certainly that’s not what one would expect a priori if they knew Christianity was true.

I’m generally suspicious of arguments from prophecy for two main reasons. First, in every case, there’s an alternative reading that’s not crazy on its face. This is precisely what you’d expect on the assumption that the argument from prophecy fails, but quite unexpected if it succeeds. If one is writing of future events, it’s surprising that there’d always be a plausible second reading that’s not about that event. Certainly this is not how writing about past events works—when people write about Caesar, there isn’t usually a plausible second interpretation of their writing.

Second, the Bible is a big book. I write about 2,000 words per day, and have done so for years. Still, I’ve only written a few times as many words as the Bible. It’s not at all surprising that if you search through this behemoth book, you’d find some things that sound like they’re about Jesus. You can find similar things in Plato’s Republic, for instance:

What they will say is this: that such being his disposition the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding-iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified,¹ and so will learn his lesson that not to be but to seem just is what we ought to desire.

This is after a discussion of how a perfectly just person would face terrible punishment for their righteousness.

The other main prophecy cited is Isaiah 53. I’ve already discussed this prophecy in some detail. In short, while I think Christians have a not crazy reading, Jews have a plausible reading too. Isaiah 53 tells of a suffering servant who will be wounded for the healings of the speaker.

Plausibly, the speaker is the gentile nations and the suffering servant is Israel. This explains the passage in Isaiah 49:3 that says “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.” Isaiah 53 can be read as being the gentile nations decrying the suffering of Israel after the Messiah comes and they see the righteousness of the Jewish people.

One Christian reply: Isaiah 49:6 says says to the servant “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” How can the servant, if it’s Israel, restore the state of Israel? Here, I think there are two plausible replies:

1. Imagine you said something like “you America, are lady liberty.”
   Then you went on to say “I was not content for lady liberty to bring
   freedom just to America, but to all the nations of the world." Here,
   you're talking in a pretty non-literal way—using a hypothetical being
   to represent America and then commenting on the being as if it’s in some way distinct from America. You’re treating a being in some ways as representative of America, in other ways as distinct.

2. A common interpretation is that the servant refers to the righteous remnant in Israel. Rather than referring to all of Israel, it refers only to the faithful. This can explain the above passage.

There’s a lot more to be said about this. Gather an Orthodox Jew and a religious Christian, attach a generator to their mouths, and their arguing can create enough energy to power a city. I don’t think either argument is knockdown. Consequently, I don’t think this gives very strong reason to be a Christian.

6.3 The resurrection

The best argument for Christianity comes from the evidence for the resurrection. Most Christians agree with this, even those who advocate the other arguments. The most common way of arguing for the resurrection involves claiming that there are some historically well-established minimal facts, and these make the resurrection likely.

What are these minimal facts? I’ll list them in order of how agreed upon they are:

1. The disciples thought they saw appearances of the risen Jesus.

2. Paul, a persecutor of the early Church, had an experience of the risen Jesus.

3. They thought they saw group appearances of the risen Jesus.

4. They were willing to suffer and face persecution for their faith.

5. James, Jesus’s skeptical brother, became convinced Jesus rose from the dead after coming to believe he had an experience of the risen Jesus.

6. Jesus was buried in a tomb.

7. The tomb was later found empty.

Note that the disciples believed to have appearances of the risen Jesus very early. 1 Corinthians 15 came from a creed widely believed to date from just a few years after Jesus’s death:

³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance^[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas,^[b] and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Here’s what I regard to be the most plausible explanation of these facts. After the Christians died, because they revered Jesus and were in a highly religious community, some of them claimed they saw Jesus. Through some combination of social pressure (if Jesus appeared to you, that made you special in some way) and newly formed expectations, eventually more people claimed that they saw the risen Jesus. Over years of retellings, the stories got merged together to the point of being about group hallucinations, which we know sometimes happens. This fervor eventually spread to James, who was originally a skeptic.

Paul, a persecutor of the Church, was just one of quite a few persecutors. Partially as a result of guilt from his persecuting the Church, he had some experience that he later interpreted to be of Jesus. This might have been a more normal experience that he later talked himself into thinking was about Jesus, or it may have been some sort of distinctly religious experience—those are quite common across the world. Thus, Paul flipped and became a committed Christian.

There was no empty tomb or burial.

This may seem outlandish, but religious communities do seem to have a great ability to believe similar claims. In fact, the Christian claims look rather similar to the early Mormon claims. Three people—Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris —signed a formal statement asserting that an angel showed them the golden plate, they heard God's voice declare the translation was correct, and they saw the engravings on the plates. Eight other witnesses said they saw the golden plates. None of them recanted even after they later left the Church.

There’s abundant evidence that people come to falsely believe in miracles fairly easily. Many people have (somehow) come to believe falsely believe that witches stole their penis, so that the belief was widespread in some cultures. The ancients were much more disposed to believe miracles than modern people are.

Now, I’ll agree that this account isn’t super probable. In particular, it takes a big probabilistic hit from the testimony of Paul. One wouldn’t expect him to have an experience of the risen Jesus, though exactly how improbable it is, it’s hard to say, in light of the surrounding context. Christianity clearly has the best miraculous evidence of any religion. But in light of the above arguments, I don’t think Christianity ends up likelier overall. The resurrection evidence has some force, but it’s outweighed by other considerations.

Why doubt the empty tomb and the burial? While we have some early burial report as early as 1 Corinthians, it’s not detailed and says nothing of burial in a tomb. There are various arguments made on both sides with varying levels of force. None seems to me to be knockdown (for convincing replies to the arguments for the burial and empty tomb, see Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God. If one is already committed to thinking Christianity is unlikely, they have reason to think the empty tomb is probably false.

Most decisively, in my view, is that people who were crucified were usually left up on the cross—Bart Ehrman shows this in the aforementioned book. In addition, criminals of all sorts were tossed into common graves most of the time. Thus, probably Jesus would be tossed into a mass grave. In short, I find these statistical arguments more compelling than the specific accounts.

Greg Monette criticizes Ehrman’s claims. Monette cites a Roman document, called the Digesta, that says:

“The bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives; and the Divine Augustus, in the Tenth Book of his Life, said that this rule had been observed. At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason. Even the bodies of those who have been sentenced to be burned can be claimed, in order that their bones and ashes, after having been collected, may be buried”

But this was written hundreds of years after the event in question. In addition, it never makes reference to crucifixion—a uniquely humiliating death. This evidence doesn’t seem that convincing against Ehrman’s wall of sources showing that almost always, such people were left to rot on the cross.

(Edit 4/18: I’m now less certain about this. None of Ehrman’s sources seem to be specific to Jerusalem during the period in question. The Jews were opposed to leaving the bodies up as such a thing is prohibited in Deuteronomy. And the Digesta was talking about which practices were common in the preceding decades. Additionally Josephus seems to indicate that the Romans of the period gave significant deference to Jewish burial practices of the time. Additionally, in Jewish War 4.317, Josephus seems to indicate that the standard practice of the time was to bury the corpses, writing:

"They actually went so far in their impiety as to cast out the corpses without burial [during the war], though the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset."

In light of this, I’ll have to think more about the veracity of the burial).

People often argue that the tomb must have been empty because the testimony to it came from women, and in a patriarchal Jewish society, that wouldn’t have been made up. I find this argument doubtful for two reasons. First, thematically, a key part of the Markan narrative is that Jesus’s disciples were doubtful and had abandoned him. The women were the only game in town!

Second, women were tasked with rubbing spices on corpses a few days after death. Thus, in light of the surrounding context, women discovering the tomb would have made a lot more sense than men discovering it.

Thus, I think we can give a plausible explanation of the facts of the resurrection without assuming that Jesus rose. This story will be a bit contrived, and will take a probabilistic hit. But, in my judgment, it is the less improbable outcome in light of the many powerful objections to Christianity.

7 Conclusion

In this essay, I’ve explained why I’m not a Christian. I’d appreciate longform replies from thoughtful Christians, as I’d like to believe Christianity if it’s true. While I recognize that there are considerations on both sides, in my view, the cumulative considerations against Christianity have far more force than the historical evidence for Christianity.

There’s not a single argument against Christianity that’s knockdown. Instead, there’s a mix of many different considerations, which collectively have great force. In light of this, I think even one who is convinced of theism, as I am, should not become a Christian.